Teaching Critical Thinking for Transfer Across

Domains.
Dispositions, Skills, Structure Training, and
Metacognitive Monitoring

Diane F. Halpem California State University, San Bernardino

Advances in technology and changes in necessary workplace

skills have made the ability to think critically more important
than ever before, yet there is ample evidence that many adults
consistently engage in flawed thinking. Numerous studies have
shown that critical thinking, defined as the deliberate use of
skills and strategies that increase the probability of a
desirable outcome, can be learned in ways that promote transfer
to novel contexts. A 4-part empirically based model is proposed
to guide teaching and learning for critical thinking: (a) a
dispositional component to prepare learners for effortful
cognitive work, (b) instruction in the skills of critical
thinking, (c) training in the structural aspects of problems and
arguments to promote transcontextual transfer of critical-
thinking skills, and (d) a metacognitive component that includes
checking for accuracy and monitoring progress toward the goal.

Here are some scary facts about the critical-thinking

practices of college students and the American public in
general: Approximately 78% of women and 70% of men read their
horoscopes, with many believing that these horoscopes are so
often correct that they were written especially for them
(Lister, 1992); they phone their personal psychics, at a cost
that many cannot afford, for advice on matters that range from
how to invest their money to whether a loved one should be
disconnected from life support systems; they spend huge sums of
money on a variety of remedies for which there is no evidence
that they work or are even safe to take— sometimes with
disastrous results. In a survey of college students, more than
99% expressed their belief in at least one of the following:
channeling, clairvoyance, precognition, telepathy, psychic
surgery, psychic healing, healing crystals, psychokinesis,
astral travel, levitation, the Bermuda triangle mystery, UFOs,
plant consciousness, auras, or ghosts, and more than 65%
reported that they personally experienced at least one of these
phenomena (Messer & Griggs, 1989).
 Beliefs in paranormal phenomena pose a problem for
psychologists who want to understand how people create and
maintain these beliefs when there is no credible evidence that
they have any basis in fact. When psychologists probe for the
origin of these beliefs, they find that believers in psychic
phenomena often use scientific jargon and fundamental concepts
of scientific understanding, but the words do not match their
usual definitions and the concepts are misunderstood.

A recent article in the popular magazine Life (Miller, 1997)

provides insights into paranormal beliefs. Miller quoted from
his interview with someone he described as a physicist-
astrologer: “To me, astrology was in the most flaky class of
crystal-healing, useless poppycock . . . until I began to see
the data” (p. 46). The data that changed this physicist into a
devotee of astrology were ‘ ‘a few, small, but significant
correlations” (p. 46), scattered among a large number of
nonsignificant correlations. This evidence sounds like an
operational definition of a Type I error to most psychologists,
but to most people in the real world (where the real world is
defined as those who have, at best, a fuzzy understanding of the
principles of probability), these are convincing data. Although
the differences may be more apparent, there are many
similarities between the methods used by people with little or
no scientific training and the scientific method. Like
scientists, all people seek meaningful causal connections among
the myriad of correlated events that they encounter, often
looking especially hard for causal explanations for unusual
events. It’s not that occult beliefs arise in the absence of
reasoning; they are more likely caused by bugs in the reasoning
process. Naive and flawed reasoning practices, such as illusory
correlations (believing that two variables are correlated when
they are not), are resistant to change because they make sense
to the individual, and for the most part, the individual
believes that they work.

Editor’s note. Articles based on APA award addresses are given

special consideration in the American Psychologist’s editorial
selection process.

A version of this article was originally presented as part of

an Award for Distinguished Career Contributions to Education and
Training in Psychology address at the 105th Annual Convention of
the American Psychological Association, Chicago, IL, August
1997.

Author’s note. Correspondence concerning this article should

be addressed to Diane F. Halpem, Department of Psychology,
California State University, San Bernardino, 5500 University
Parkway, San Bernardino, CA 92407-2397. Electronic mail may be
sent to dhalpern@ wiley.csusb.edu.

April 1998 • American Psychologist 449

Copyright 1998 by the American Psychological Association, Inc.

0003-066X/98/S2.00 Vol. 53, No. 4, 449-455
 Furthermore, for many believers in paranormal phenomena, the
laws of the paranormal have to work only some of the time, so
believers see no value in disconfirming evidence.

Consider a lead editorial in a recent edition of USA Today

entitled “Forget Day-Care Research—Trust Your Instincts”
(Parker, 1997). The readers of USA Today were urged to ignore
the results of the National Institute of Child Health and Human
Development’s seven-year study on day care. Instead, they were
asked to rely on Parker’s intuition about the negative effects
of day care. As Scarr (1997) recently noted, when the results of
a scientific study of day care are pitted against intuition or
the observations of a single individual, the general public
tends to find these two sources of information equally
compelling. Everyone has some experience with children and
opinions about child rearing, and everyone believes that their
personal experiences and those of people whom they trust are as
valid and reliable as inferences made from large- scale studies.
Numerous adages exemplify these beliefs, including “experience
is the best teacher” (a misquote from Benjamin Franklin, who
said that it was a dear or expensive teacher; Dawes, 1994) and
“seeing is believing.’ * Faceless statistical averages gleaned
from large samples are no match for vivid examples that are
experienced personally. Even statistically astute psychologists,
who quickly criticize experimental designs with small sample
sizes (especially when they do not like the conclusions),
willingly accept their own personal experiences as valid and
sufficient data (Dawes, 1994). This is why testimonials are so
compelling, a fact that advertisers use to their advantage, and
a single counterexample that supports a favored view (“I know a
person who” phenomenon) is often used to disprove a conclusion
derived from a large study (Gilovich, 1991). The primacy of
personal experience is bolstered by two common themes that are
repeated like a mantra in the popular media: (a) Science, like
the government, cannot be trusted, and (b) anyone can lie with
statistics. When the bases of personal beliefs are viewed in
this context, it is easy to understand why large crowds gathered
in Roswell, New Mexico, in the summer of 1997 to celebrate the
golden anniversary of the landing of alien life-forms on earth.
Bertrand Russell summed up the situation well when he said,
“Most people would sooner die than think, in fact they do” (as
quoted in Bolander, 1987, p. 69).

Given all of these examples, it is not surprising that many

colleges in the United States and other places throughout the
world now require all students to take a course in critical
thinking as part of their general education program. There is
virtually no disagreement over the need to help college students
improve how they think. Both George Bush and Bill Clinton
supported the national education goal for higher education that
declared that it was a national priority to enhance critical
thinking in college students, although this national priority
was never funded (National Education Goals Panel, 1991).

Hunt (1995) examined the skills that will be needed by the

workforce in the early decades of the next century and asked,
“Will we be smart enough?” The answer to this question will
determine the quality of life and the future of the United
States and the whole planet. The most important reason for
making the enhancement of critical-thinking skills the primary
objective of higher education is that the rest of the world has
changed and is continuing to change at an accelerating rate. As
Hunt persuasively argued, the workforce is one critical place
where the dizzying pace of change can be witnessed. The number
of jobs available in manufacturing is shrinking; those workers
with poor cognitive skills can expect more competition for fewer
jobs that pay poorly, while at the same time, there is an
increased demand for a new type of worker—this new job category
has been dubbed the “knowledge worker” dr the “symbol analyst”
to describe someone who can carry out multistep operations,
manipulate abstract and complex symbols and ideas, efficiently
acquire new information, and remain flexible enough to recognize
the need for continuing change and new paradigms for lifelong
learning. Many of psychology’s subdisciplines—human learning,
life span development, program evaluation, cognition, social
psychology, psychometrics, industrial-organizational psychology,
and others-—can be used to bring about fundamental changes in
educational systems. The rate at which knowledge has been
growing is exponential, and the most valued asset of any society
in the coming decades is a knowledgeable, thinking citizenry—
human capital is the wisest investment.

The information explosion is yet another reason why specific

instruction in thinking needs to be provided. People now have an
incredible wealth of information available, quite literally at
their fingertips, via the Internet and other remote services
with only a few minutes of search time on the computer. The
problem has become knowing what to do with the deluge of data.
The information has to be selected, interpreted, digested,
evaluated, learned, and applied or it is of no more use on a
computer screen than it is on a library shelf. If people cannot
think intelligently about the myriad issues that confront them,
then they are in danger of having all of the answers but still
not knowing what the answers mean. The dual abilities of knowing
how to learn and knowing how to think clearly about the rapidly
proliferating information that they will be required to deal
with will provide the best education for citizens of the 21st
century.

Teaching for Critical Thinking

The goal of helping students improve their critical-thinking

abilities represents a major change in the way the teaching and
learning process is viewed. The term critical thinking refers to
the use of those cognitive skills or strategies that increase
the probability of a desirable outcome—in the long run, critical
thinkers will have more desirable outcomes than “noncritical”
thinkers (where “desirable” is defined by the individual, such
as making good career choices or wise financial investments).
Critical thinking is purposeful, reasoned, and goal-directed. It
is the kind of thinking involved in solving problems.

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 formulating inferences, calculating likelihoods, and making
decisions. Critical thinkers use these skills appropriately,
without prompting, and usually with conscious intent in a
variety of settings. That is, they are predisposed to think
critically. When people think critically, they are evaluating
the outcomes of their thought processes—how good a decision is
or how well a problem is solved (Halp- em, 1996). Critical
thinking also involves evaluating the thinking process—the
reasoning that went into the conclusion one arrived at or the
kinds of factors considered in making a decision. In the term
critical thinking, the word critical is not meant to imply
‘‘finding fault,” as it might be used in a pejorative way to
describe someone who is always making negative comments. It is
used instead in the sense of “critical” that involves evaluation
or judgment, ideally with the goal of providing useful and
accurate feedback that serves to improve the thinking process.

Critical-thinking skills are often referred to as higher order

cognitive skills to differentiate them from simpler (i.e., lower
order) thinking skills. Higher order skills are relatively
complex; require judgment, analysis, and synthesis; and are not
applied in a rote or mechanical manner. Higher order thinking is
thinking that is reflective, sensitive to the context, and self-
monitored. Computational arithmetic, for example, is not a
higher order skill, even though it is an important skill,
because it involves the rote application of well-learned rules
with little concern for context or other variables that would
affect the outcome. By contrast, deciding which of two
information sources is more credible is a higher order cognitive
skill because it is a judgment task in which the variables that
affect credibility are multidimensional and change with the
context. In real life, critical-thinking skills are needed
whenever people grapple with complex issues and messy, ill-
defined problems.

Can Better Thinking Be Learned?

There are numerous, qualitatively different types of evidence

showing that students can become better thinkers as a result of
appropriate instruction. Indicators of positive change include
self-reports, gains in adult cognitive development, higher
scores on commercially available and research versions of tests
of critical thinking, superior responses to novel open-ended
questions (graded blindly—without the rater knowing if the
student received instruction in critical thinking), and changes
in the organization of information, among others (reviewed in
Halpem, 1996). The goal of instruction designed to help students
become better thinkers is transferability to real-world, out-of-
the-classroom situations. With this goal in mind, the ideal
learning assessment would occur naturally in the course of one’s
life, in multiple settings, and would provide comparable
measures before, during, and long after the instruction. It
would describe what an individual thinks and does when reading a
newspaper editorial, selecting a career objective, or voting on
a bond issue at times when the individual is not aware of being
assessed. Unfortunately, this sort of intrusive and
surreptitious assessment is not feasible, but some clever
attempts have come close, Lehman and Nisbett (1990), for
example, examined the spontaneous transfer of selected thinking
skills in an out-of-the-classroom, real-world environment. They
phoned students at home several months after the completion of
their course work and posed questions under the guise of a
household survey. Results were supportive of the idea that the
students had learned and spontaneously used the thinking skills
that had been taught in their college classes when the questions
were asked in an ecologically valid setting (their own homes),
with novel topics, several months after the semester had ended.
This sort of assessment provides evidence that critical thinking
can be learned with appropriate instruction and that it can and
does transfer to novel domains of knowledge. There are numerous
other successful reports of the transfer of critical-thinking
skills to a variety of settings (Kosonen & Winne, 1995; Nisbett,
1993; Perkins & Grotzer, 1997).

A Four-Part Model for Enhancing Critical Thinking

In critical-thinking instruction, the goal is to promote the

learning of transcontextual thinking skills and the awareness of
and ability to direct one’s own thinking and learning. Although
thinking always occurs within a domain of knowledge, the usual
methods that are used for teaching content matter are not
optimal for teaching the thinking skills that psychologists and
other educators want students to use in multiple domains because
instruction in most courses focuses on content knowledge (as
might be expected) instead of the transferability of critical-
thinking skills. For this reason, instruction in critical
thinking poses unique problems. Fortunately, there already are
powerful models of human learning that can be used as a guide
for the redesign of education for thinking. The basic principles
of these models are taken from cognitive psychology, the
empirical branch of psychology that deals with questions about
how people think, learn, and remember, or more specifically, how
people acquire, utilize, organize, and retrieve information.

It is clear that a successful pedagogy that can serve as a

basis for the enhancement of thinking will have to incorporate
ideas about the way in which learners organize knowledge and
internally represent it and the way these representations change
and resist change when new information is encountered. Despite
all of the gains that cognitive psychologists have made in
understanding what happens when people learn, most teachers do
not apply their knowledge of cognitive psychology (Schoen,
1983).

The model that I am proposing for teaching thinking skills so

they will transfer across domains of knowledge consists of four
parts: (a) a dispositional or attitudinal component, (b)
instruction in and practice with critical- thinking skills, (c)
structure-training activities designed to facilitate transfer
across contexts, and (d) a metacogni- tive component used to
direct and assess thinking. Each of these components is grounded
in theories and research in cognitive psychology. The underlying
idea is that the

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 general research-based principles of how adults learn can be
used to enhance their critical-thinking skills ( Angelo,1993).

Dispositions for Effortful Thinking and Learning

Critical thinking is more than the successful use of a

particular skill in an appropriate context. It is also an
attitude or disposition to recognize when a skill is needed and
the willingness to apply it. Sears and Parsons (1991) called
these dispositions the ethic of a critical thinker. There are
large differences among cognitive tasks in the effort that is
required in learning and thinking. For example, most people
effortlessly learn the plot of a television sitcom they are
watching, but they need to expend concerted mental effort and
cognitive monitoring to learn how to analyze complex arguments
or how to convert a word problem into a spatial display.
Similarly, routine problems tend to be solved with habitual
solutions, sometimes so effortlessly that the problem solver has
no conscious awareness of the process. By contrast, critical
thinking requires the conscious exertion of mental effort. In
other words, it is cognitive work. Learners need to understand
and be prepared for the effortful nature of critical thinking so
they do not abandon the process too soon, believing that the
thinking should have been easier or accomplished more quickly.
The development of expertise in any area requires deliberate,
effortful, and intense cognitive work (Wagner, 1997). Not
surprisingly, critical thinking is no exception to these general
principles.

It is important to separate the disposition or willingness to

think critically from the ability to think critically. Some
people may have excellent critical-thinking skills and may
recognize when the skills are needed, but they also may choose
not to engage in the effortful process of using them. This is
the distinction between what people can do and what they
actually do in real-world contexts. It is of no value to teach
students the skills of critical thinking if they do not use
them. Good instructional programs help learners decide when to
make the necessary mental investment in critical thinking and
when a problem or argument is not worth the effort. An extended
session of generating alternatives and calculating probabilities
is a reasonable response to a diagnosis of cancer; it is not
worth the effort when the decision involves the selection of an
ice-cream flavor.

A critical thinker exhibits the following dispositions or

attitudes; (a) willingness to engage in and persist at a complex
task, (b) habitual use of plans and the suppression of impulsive
activity, (c) flexibility or open-mindedness, (d) willingness to
abandon nonproductive strategies in an attempt to self-correct,
and (e) an awareness of the social realities that need to be
overcome (such as the need to seek consensus or compromise) so
that thoughts can become actions.

A Skiffs Approach to Critical Thinking

Critical-thinking instruction is predicated on two

assumptions: (a) that there are clearly identifiable and
definable thinking skills that students can be taught to
recognize and apply appropriately and (b) if these thinking
skills are recognized and applied, the students will be more
effective thinkers. A general list of skills that would be
applicable in almost any class would include understanding how
cause is determined, recognizing and criticizing assumptions,
analyzing means-goals relationships, giving reasons to support a
conclusion, assessing degrees of likelihood and uncertainty,
incorporating isolated data into a wider framework, and using
analogies to solve problems.

A short taxonomy of critical-thinking skills is proposed as a

guide for instruction: (a) verbal reasoning skills—This category
includes those skills needed to comprehend and defend against
the persuasive techniques that are embedded in everyday
language; (b) argument analysis skills—An argument is a set of
statements with at least one conclusion and one reason that
supports the conclusion. In real-life settings, arguments are
complex, with reasons that run counter to the conclusion, stated
and unstated assumptions, irrelevant information, and
intermediate steps; (c) skills in thinking as hypothesis
testing—The rationale for this category is that people function
like intuitive scientists to explain, predict, and control
events. These skills include generalizability, recognition of
the need for an adequately large sample size, accurate
assessment, and validity, among others; (d) likelihood and
uncertainty—Because very few events in life can be known with
certainty, the correct use of cumulative, exclusive, and
contingent probabilities should play a critical role in almost
every decision; (e) decisionmaking and problem-solving skills—In
some sense, all of the critical-thinking skills are used to make
decisions and solve problems, but the ones that are included
here involve generating and selecting alternatives and judging
among them. Creative thinking is subsumed under this category
because of its importance in generating alternatives and
restating problems and goals.

The categories and skills listed in this taxonomy have face

validity and, thus, can be easily communicated to the general
public and students. They represent one possible answer to the
question of what college graduates need to know and be able to
do so that they can compete and cooperate in the world’s
marketplace and function as effective citizens in a complex
democratic community. Taken together, these five categories
(sometimes referred to as ‘'macroabilities”) define an
organizational rubric for a skills approach to critical
thinking. They have the benefit of focusing on skills that are
teachable and generalizare and, therefore, would help to bridge
the gap between thinking skills that can be taught in college
and those skills that are needed in the workplace.

Structure Training to Promote Transfer

When one is teaching for thinking, the goal is to have

students not only understand and successfully use the particular
skill or strategy being taught but also be able to recognize
where that particular skill might be appropriate in novel
situations. The critical component in an

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 ecologically valid critical-thinking process is recognizing or
noticing that a particular thinking skill may be needed. This is
the Achilles’ heel of transfer. It can be thought of as a
problem of memory because recognizing the need for a particular
skill involves the ability of external cues to trigger retrieval
processes in long-term memory, so information about a thinking
skill can move into working memory, where it can be consciously
considered. As is known from cognitive psychology, what gets
remembered at retrieval heavily depends on what occurred during
learning. Information that is associated with material being
learned can function as an effective retrieval cue when the
learning is completed. For example, if one went to high school
with a next-door neighbor, seeing or thinking about this
neighbor in later years would bring a host of high school
memories to mind by moving them from their dormant state in
long-term memory into the active consciousness of working
memory. The problem in learning thinking skills that are needed
in multiple contexts is that there are no obvious cues in the
novel contexts that can trigger the recall of the thinking
skills. Students need to create retrieval cues from the
structural aspects of a problem or argument, so when these
structural aspects are present in the novel context, they can
serve as cues for retrieval. Hummel and Holy oak (1997)
identified structure sensitivity as a fundamental property that
underlies human thought: 4‘First thinking is structure sensitive.
Reasoning, problem solving, and learning . . , depend on a
capacity to code and manipulate relational knowledge” (p. 427).
Thus, when one is teaching for the transfer of thinking skills,
one should ensure that the structural aspects of problems and
arguments are made salient so that they can function as
retrieval cues. An example should help with this concept.

Suppose that one is teaching students about “sunk costs,” a

difficult concept for many students to grasp. The general idea
is that prior investments are not relevant to decisions about
future costs. (If the prior investments are unrecoverable, they
are, in effect, sunk or lost.) What is relevant is the value of
the object from the present and into the future. Thus, if a
friend explains that he or she plans to spend $500 to repair a
beat-up, old car because the friend has already spent hundreds
on its repair, he or she is making a sunk-costs argument. The
decision should be based on whether the car is now worth a $500
repair; all of the previous costs are irrelevant for this
decision. The goal of transferable thinking skills would be
achieved if students recognize sunk-costs arguments when they
are being made in totally different settings and can apply what
has been learned about these arguments in the new settings.
Psychologists and other educators want students who will
retrieve and use their knowledge of sunk costs when they hear a
senator urging Congress to spend millions of dollars on a
missile system because the military has already invested
billions into the missile system in the past or when a friend
explains that he plans to marry a longtime girlfriend because
they have already spent so many years together.

When critical-thinking skills are taught so that they transfer

appropriately and spontaneously, students learn to actively
focus on the structure of problems or arguments so the
underlying characteristics become salient, instead of the
domain-specific surface characteristics. The cues for
recognizing all three of these situations as sunk-costs
arguments are not in the content area. There is not much
similarity among an old car, an expensive missile, and a bride-
to-be. Information about sunk costs needs to be represented in
the learner’s memory in a generic form so that it will be
recalled whenever this type of argument is made, regardless of
the subject matter. On the basis of what is already known about
adults’ learning, students need spaced practice with different
sorts of examples and corrective feedback to develop the habit
of “spontaneous noticing.” Learning should be arranged to
facilitate retrieval of skills in a way that does not depend on
the content area.

The representation of information in memory is a difficult and

abstract concept. I am not referring to memory in terms of its
neurochemical underpinnings but rather the relationship between
the way information is stored and the way it is used for a
particular purpose. Cognitive psychologists think of meaning as
the way a concept is embedded in a web of related concepts. A
concept has a rich or deep meaning when it has many connections
to other concepts. When activated, or brought to consciousness,
concepts can act as a recall cue for the related concepts to
which they are connected. One way to promote effective
organization is through the use of elaboration (and other
techniques) that develop interconnected knowledge structures. In
general, the greater the number of connections to information
stored in memory, the greater the likelihood that it will be
recalled.

When a person elaborates a concept, he or she forms many

meaningful connections—the concept is related to other relevant
concepts. There are many techniques that can be used in
elaboration. An especially effective technique is the use of
thoughtful questions, which require that learners create the
necessary connections. This is also a good technique because
recalling a fact or concept is different from learning it. The
best way to ensure recall is to practice recall—not mindless
practice, but meaningful practice with feedback. The questions
used to develop connected knowledge structures need to be drawn
from the real-world contexts that are frequently encountered in
the workplace and in the exercise of citizenship. This
requirement will virtually ensure face validity and will be
consistent with the “situated cognition” viewpoint that is
popular in the cognitive science literature and with one that 1
am extending to accommodate recall across domains (Glaser, 1992;
Rogoff & Lave, 1984). Real-life thinking is done in a context,
and a good learning environment provides a believable context
for learning exercises.

Learning tasks, like real-world thinking tasks, should be rich

in information. Some of the information available may not be
relevant, and part of the learning

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 exercise involves deciding which information is important to
the problem. What is important in the teaching and learning of
critical-thinking skills is what the learners are required to do
with the information. Learning exercises should focus on the
critical aspects of the problems and arguments that utilize the
skills. The tasks should require thoughtful analysis and
synthesis. For example, the repeated use of “authentic”
materials, or materials that are similar to real-world
situations, is one teaching strategy to enhance transfer (Derry,
Levin, & Schauble, 1995). Thinking skills need to be explicitly
and consciously taught and then used with many types of examples
so that the skill aspect and its appropriate use are clarified
and emphasized. Examples of elaborative questions are presented
in Table 1.

Table 1

Examples of Relevant Tasks and Questions That Require Learners

to Attend to Structural Aspects

of a Problem or Argument

Draw a diagram or other graphic display that organizes the

information. (This sort of task makes the structure of a problem
or argument clear.)

What additional information would you want before answering the

question? (This requires the thinkers- learners to think about
what is missing from the information that is given.)

Explain why you selected a particular multipie-choice

alternative. Which alternative is second best? Why? (The giving
of reasons is a good way to focus on the thinking that went into
an answer rather than the answer itself.)

State the problem in at least two ways. (Most real-world

problems are fuzzy, that is, they really are potentially many
problems, each with its own possible solution.)

Which information is most important? Which information is least

important? Why? (This question focuses the learners' attention
on the value of different sorts of information.)

Categorize the findings in a meaningful way. (By grouping or

labeling individual pieces of information, a structure emerges
that is not apparent when they are kept separate.)

List two solutions for the problem. (This encourages a more

creative approach.)

What is wrong with an assertion that was made in the question?

(This reminds the learners that problems often contain
misleading information.)

Present two reasons that support the conclusion and two reasons
that do not support the conclusion. (Questions of this sort do
not permit black-and-white reasoning.)

Identify the type of persuasive technique that is used in the

question. Is it valid, or is it designed to mislead the reader?
Explain your answer. (Learners are required to consider the
motives and credibility of their information source when
responding to these questions.)

What two actions would you take to improve the design of a study
that was described? (Learners need to think about better types
of evidence or procedures that might have provided different
results.)

Metacognitive Monitoring

Metacognition is the executive or “boss” function that guides

how adults use different learning strategies and make decisions
about the allocation of limited cognitive resources. The term is
usually defined as ‘ ‘what we know about what we know” and the
ability to use this knowledge to direct and improve the thinking
and learning process. It refers to the self-awareness and
planning functions that guide the use of thinking skills. When
engaging in critical thinking, students need to monitor their
thinking process, checking whether progress is being made toward
an appropriate goal, ensuring accuracy, and making decisions
about the use of time and mental effort. Metacognitive
monitoring skills need to be made explicit and public so that
they can be examined and feedback can be given about how well
they are functioning. A few explicit guiding questions can be
used as a way of converting what is usually an implicit process
into an explicit one. For example, students can be given a
problem or an argument to analyze and then asked the following
questions before they begin the task: (a) How much time and
effort is this problem worth? (b) What do you already know about
this problem or argument? (c) What is the goal or reason for
engaging in extended and careful thought about this problem or
argument? (d) How difficult do you think it will be to solve
this problem or reach a conclusion? (e) How will you know when
you have reached the goal? (f) What critical-thinking skills are
likely to be useful in solving this problem or analyzing this
argument? As students work on the problem or argument, they
should be asked to assess their progress toward the goal, (g)
Are you moving toward a solution? Finally, when the task is
completed, the students should be asked to judge how well the
problem was solved or how well the argument was analyzed. Well-
structured questions will help students reflect on their
learning and may provide insights that will be useful in the
future.

Correcting Faulty Thinking Patterns

The four-part model being proposed is designed for teaching

and learning a large and flexible repertoire of critical-
thinking skills, assessing their effectiveness, and developing
the disposition to use them. It is, by design, best suited for
achieving the goal of transferable thinking skills that are used
across domains of knowledge. It recognizes the critical role
played by dispositional attributes, provides examples of
directed learning activities to facilitate the transfer of
general skills across domains, and provides examples for making
metacognitive monitoring more active and conscious. How can this
model be used to get the horoscope-reading, psychic-phoning
students in classes to think more critically about these topics?

First, like students, instructors need to understand that this

will be an effortful process. Beliefs that have been constructed
over many years and the habits of mind that developed along with
them will take multiple learning experiences, distributed over
time and settings, before they will be successfully replaced
with new ways of

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 thinking and knowing about the world. Students need to be told
to expect that a thoughtful consideration of evidence and
arguments will require the expenditure of mental effort so that
they do not expect quick and easy answers and will not be
surprised by the amount of effort required of them. To change a
mental model of how the world works (e.g., the position of the
planets at the time of one’s birth predicts personality traits),
instructors need to understand the mental models that exist
prior to instruction and design learning activities that expose
the errors in these naive models and make the benefits of the
new model obvious. For example, students can more objectively
examine their underlying beliefs by making clear, explicit
statements about the reasons they believe that horoscopes are
valid predictors of the future or sources of sound advice.
Counterevidence can then be used to challenge these beliefs. A
good demonstration for analyzing horoscopes is to give a class
12 unlabeled horoscopes and have students select the one that is
most descriptive of them. After collecting the responses, the
instructor can determine if the students scored significantly
above chance in selecting the horoscope corresponding to their
“sign” (Ward & Grasha, 1986). A follow-up activity is to have
the class generate a list of possible “tests” that would provide
evidence about the validity of horoscopes. This list will
usually lead to an examination of the vague language used in
horoscopes, the absence of a rationale for the belief that the
time of one’s birth is a significant predictor of personality or
future events, and more. As information is gathered and
reasoning analyzed, students can make judgments about their own
degree of belief in horoscopes so that they are consciously
monitoring their understanding and thinking processes.
Extensions of this exercise to palm reading and graphology can
provide the transcontextual practice that focuses on the
structural similarities among these ways of predicting future
events. The goal of these exercises is not to take any
particular dogmatic stand but to give students critical-thinking
skills so they can make better informed decisions and solve
problems with a greater likelihood of success.

The emphasis in learning activities, such as this one, is on

the identification and use of transferable thinking skills so
students will be better prepared for the unknown challenges in
their future. When psychologists and other educators consider
that many college students may be working at jobs that do not
exist today and living in the decades beginning with 2060 and
2070, it seems clear that the ability to think clearly and the
disposition to engage in the effortful process of thinking are
the most critical components of their education. The enhancement
of critical-thinking skills is also the most challenging and
personally rewarding task in which psychologists and educators
can engage.

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